32-foot-long hull of 18th century ship found buried at World Trade Center

The unearthing of the wooden vessel, buried some 25 feet below street level, is the first large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront in three decades. (Bonifacio/News)

Workers excavating at the World Trade Center site have made an extraordinary discovery: a 32-foot-long hull of a ship believed to have been buried in the 18th century.

The unearthing of the wooden vessel, buried some 25 feet below street level, is the first large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront in three decades.

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Archeologists say the ship likely was a part of a large batch of debris used to fill in land to extend lower Manhattan into the Hudson River. It was uncovered Tuesday morning.

"We noticed curved timbers that a backhoe brought up," archeologist Molly McDonald said, according to the Associated Press. "We quickly found the rib of a vessel and continued to clear it away and expose the hull over the last two days."

McDonald and her colleague from the firm AKRF, A. Michael Pappalardo, had been assigned to the site of the 9/11 attacks to document historical objects uncovered during construction. They called the discovery significant, but said it would take time to determine the precise age of the ship.

The archeologists are in a race against time. The ship's delicate wood, now exposed to the air, is likely to start deteriorating quickly. A boat specialist was planning to visit the site Thursday.

"We're going to send timber samples to a laboratory to do dendochronology that will help us to get a sense of when the boat was constructed," McDonald said.

Workers also found a 100-pound anchor in the same area, but they're not sure if it belongs to the ship. The last time a major archeological find was made along the waterfront was in 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship was discovered under 175 Water St.

Pappalardo expressed surprise that the ship was discovered intact so many years after it was buried underground.

"I kept thinking of how closely it came to being destroyed," he added.